


The Arrow

by Trixen



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 05:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4693880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixen/pseuds/Trixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Directly after 'The Gift', Buffy is given glimpses of what could be the results of her choices. A lot of her men and women make appearances. She makes another choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Arrow

_And I  
Am the arrow,   
  
The dew that flies,  
Suicidal, at one with the drive  
  
Into the red   
Eye, the cauldron of morning._  
\- “Ariel” Sylvia Plath  
  
We are in the cut. The bus slices furrows through the thick desert sand. I am jostled by the rumbling of the wheels and by Dawn’s face pressing against the hot crease of my neck. Her mouth is a little red tunnel when she yawns and the glow of her teeth catches the scissors of sunlight arcing over us. We have left Sunnydale behind. Most everyone is sleeping.  
  
Every minute or so I hear Xander. He is crying but he won’t let anyone see. I can respect that. He makes a snuffling sound when he wipes his face against his sleeve. I imagine how he must look, pressing his swollen eyes into the bend of his elbow. Anya has been sucked into a vacuum, but to him, she must still be real. I can remember the way her lips would be stained pink from fruit punch. I can remember the way Angel’s lips tasted of salt and snow. It’s all the same. Little glimpses.   
  
Everyone asked me what we would do now. I don’t know.  
  
I don’t want to be their compass.  
  
Didn’t I lead the slayers in training to their deaths? I wonder about them. If they were supposed to be someone’s mother or someone’s wife. If I pointed the arrow. Because I did take them to that rip in the earth, just as surely as I once dove into Glory’s red dawn. Was I their suicide princess? I feel more like their Mother. My womb aches. Reaching down, I press tentatively inside. My fingers come back smelling of copper and tears.   
  
“Are we there yet?”  
  
“Go back to sleep,” I murmur.  
  
“C’mon…” Dawn whines. “Aren’t we _anywhere_?”   
  
“If you call the middle of the desert somewhere,” I reply without intonation. “You should rest. We have a long way to go.”  
  
“Why, Buffy?”  
  
“Because we do.”  
  
“That’s not an answer.”  
  
My eyelids feel heavy. “Well it’s the only one you’re going to get after I just averted an apocalypse.”  
  
“Fair enough.” Dawn pauses. “Where are we going, Buffy?”  
  
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “Somewhere.”  
  
My burned hand is wrapped in gauze and little droplets of ointment slink down my wrist. _I love you_. I said it once on the brink of death. I said it again. Which was the bigger lie? I didn’t have to tell Spike to close his eyes, but I still wielded the sword. He is ashes and I’m still alive. On a bus, with miles to go.   
  
I wonder what he would have been. Who else he might have loved. I don’t have any illusions.  
  
I wonder, and as I do, I drift and I sleep.  
  
+  
  
We live in Sarasota, Florida. My husband works on a military base just outside the city, in the heart of the suburbs. Every so often, he recruits young men to their private sector and I feel a pang of sadness, remembering Dawn’s words of so long ago. _It still feels sudden to me. With him gone where there’s no one to talk to him._ But I forget it soon after, because it is just another reminder of the question mark smudging our lives.   
  
I make him breakfast. Hummus on white bread with banana mashed in. It’s so disgusting that I start to gag. He sneaks up behind me and I feel his lips and tongue on the nape of my neck. He smells of butter and wheat, like the Iowa fields I know he dreams of every night.  
  
“Morning Mrs. Finn.”  
  
“Morning,” I reply. “Want an apple?”  
  
“Sure thing.”   
  
I am reminded of how depressingly easy he can be. _“Would you leave your wife for me?” “Sure thing.”_ He now carries our wedding picture in his wallet. It reminds me of a trophy. Sometimes I think I will see blood seeping from the pores of the photograph. But it remains only shiny Kodak paper; not a carcass dragged from the woods into harsh sunshine.  
  
That night we lie in bed and he talks about the jungle. Sometimes he wakes up screaming of black trees and hot skies and I calm him down by singing to him. He lies in the cradle of my lap and I rock him gently. I drove him to that hellish, thrumming green. The least I can do is get him out, again and again.   
  
“Moons and Junes and Ferris Wheels, the dizzy dancing way you feel, as every fairy tale comes real, I’ve looked at love that way…” My hands feather through his hair. His breathing becomes even and soothing. “I’ve looked at love from both sides now, from give and take and still somehow, its love’s illusions, I recall, I really don’t know love at all.”  
  
He sleeps and I kiss his stupid, selfish mouth. Sometimes I wonder about his wife. His first.  
  
And I know he doesn’t. He doesn’t wonder.  
  
+  
  
There is a little apartment overlooking the market. It is dark and smells of roses and sweat. New Orleans is beautiful in the summer. The oily air leaves a skin on my coffee each morning. He pours it down the sink and reaches for the coffee beans. Grinding them slowly until everything is drenched in the dark scent; he hums beneath his breath.   
  
“Why are you so stupid, Summers?” he looks over his naked shoulder. “Make it new if it goes funny. You can’t drink that old shit.”   
  
“Can’t I?” I murmur. The sheets of our bed are creamy soft on my knees. “And don’t call me stupid. I still have Mr. Pointy handy.”  
  
“So do I,” he leers and I can’t help but laugh.  
  
We go shopping when the sun drips over the horizon, spinning the sky into a bowl of orange. I buy flowers with purple eyes and they stare at me accusingly. Everything reminds me of Dawn. The sugary cotton candy sold by the vendors and the crackle of electricity every time he touches me. We stop by the butcher’s and get fresh hamburger meat and fresh bags of blood and freshly cut steaks. The smell of salt is over-whelming.   
  
He fucks me against the door. I will have to pick out the splinters later. His teeth are like razors and I am ribbons underneath them. I can feel his soul throbbing in every kiss, every slip-slide of skin, every slam of his cock. He hates it. He hates to _feel_. Since he came back everything is sharper and more defined. The taste of the pink between my legs. His plastic blood. The stars. He can’t take it. He blames me. _You drove me to this, Slayer. You drove me to this soul._  
  
The first time he hit me I sang to him. My lip was still bleeding a little. I gathered him in my arms and sang so softly against his ear. It sounded like a child’s whisper. “Maybe I’m amazed at the way you love me all the time. Maybe I’m afraid of the way I love you.”  
  
He grunted his pleasure at the words.   
  
“Maybe I’m a girl, maybe I’m a lonely girl who’s in the middle of something that she doesn’t really understand. Maybe I’m a girl and maybe you’re the only man who could ever help me…”  
  
He made love to me that night. So now, when I fear he will become a rock slide, impossible to stop; I sing. It is the trigger.   
  
After he comes inside me, after I feel the cool semen, I go to the fridge. Inside are the hamburger patties. Perfect circles of raw meat. I lift one and inhale. It smells faintly of rust.   
  
I eat it all and with one swipe of my tongue, I lick away the red.   
  
+  
  
It didn’t work out with Wood. She’s happy about that, or so she tells me.   
  
“He was too bossy, yo,” she laughs and her lips taste like buttered popcorn. “Wouldn’t let me take two steps before he was up my ass about something. Besides.” Her fingernails skate up my back and scratch lightly. “I didn’t want _him_. I wanted _you_.”  
  
Sometimes I feel suffocated. Her hair is a blue-black river. It looks like a bruise snaking around my belly. Everything feels slightly fizzy when her face is _there_ , as if I am swallowing carbonated water and the bubbles are popping in my blood stream. She asks me to sing when she has her tongue inside me. She asks me to sing so she can feel the vibrations through my body. I don’t know how, suddenly. I can’t concentrate.  
  
“You and I we’re two of a kind, I hate to say it but you’ll never relate what makes you tick. It makes me smile. You said that I should get away from it all, and bury my head in the sand for a while.” I gasp as she flicks her wet tongue, as if she is playing an instrument.   
  
“Sing,” she growls and her teeth score my flesh. “Sing or I’ll hurt you.”  
  
“You’re my baby, you’re just another girl, you’re just another girl.”  
  
I am still not used to the girlishness of everything. There is no penis with its purple, pulsing head. No chest hair or weird smells or sperm coating my tongue. There is familiarity. Soft fleshy breasts with their large, brown nipples. Shaved legs that abrade slightly when I run my hands down the inner, secret skin. Criss-crossing veins mapping her body for my touch, as if I have been deemed an explorer ready to chart this territory. But really, there is only one place I need help with. Calling it her pussy makes me blush, but what else is there? Vagina is so clinical, cunt makes me cringe, anything else is straying into romantic dime store novels and that’s one thing we’ll never be.  
  
Sometimes there is blood or a tampon string and sometimes there is so much clear liquid that I feel she will fill me up forever. It is so _messy_ , being a girl. Our sheets are dark blue and every night they swallow us like the lips of a whale. Tiny white stains dot the middle of the top sheet as she moves beneath me, her thighs rich and tanned and it’s so _please, let me make you come, please_ unbearable. Fucking someone who is just like me. We could be sisters. She likes when I talk like that. She says it makes her wet. I reply that everything makes her wet. “Only when it’s to do with you, B,” she says.  
  
Our loft is in the burning heart of Prague. It rests in a dilapidated old building that probably won’t pass inspection this year. We made separate rooms by hanging wispy red panels from rods strung from wall to wall. The ceiling is too high to reach. It is a vast, echoing chamber, stuffed with items of importance. A few books that we will never read, stacks of fashion magazines, pots of flowers and a chest with our livelihood. From crossbows to stakes to holy water, we have it all – but she still likes to use her fists the best. So do I, if I admit it to myself, which doesn’t happen often. It is a familiar rush. It is a familiar high.   
  
She competes with me when we fight. “How many did you pop tonight, B?”  
  
“Twenty,” I respond.  
  
“Twenty-two!” she crows. “Wanna come home now and pop _my_ cherry?”  
  
She likes me to use things on her. Fuck her with my fingers. Take all I can and ask for more.   
  
“You take and you take. You always did,” she whispers. “That’s what I love about you.”  
  
+  
  
It is so sweet, dating your best friend. That’s what I tell him when I suspect he’s angry with me about something, and it always makes him melt. He becomes like a cartoon version of himself, lips drooping, eyes softening like chocolate on a hot day, his arms opening.   
  
“Buffy,” he whispers, as if he still hasn’t quite grasped that I’m here.   
  
We dance around our living room. I stand on his feet and giggle about their size. “Like rafts!” I marvel. “Too bad you weren’t there when the iceberg hit. These could have held Rose _and_ Jack.”  
Talking about ‘Titanic’ makes him angry. “How could that woman throw that diamond in the water? What a moronic thing to do. And by the way, James Cameron? It was _blue_. Call it a sapphire and get on with your life.”  
  
He whirls me around and I press my face against the warmth of his neck. I sing to him in a high-pitched voice that makes him laugh. “I may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you, you’ll never need to doubt it, I’ll make you so sure about it…”  
  
“God knows what I’d do without you, Buff,” he chuckles and nuzzles his nose to mine. “You definitely won’t get on the cover of _Sanity Fair_ for dating me – but you won’t regret it. I promise.”  
  
He wants children desperately. Little boys that he can teach about construction. Girls that will be gentler than their mother. He told me what he wanted to name them all those years ago, on the yellow school bus that carried us into an uncertain dawn. “Its making me think about it,” he explained, gesturing to our surroundings. “And I won’t tell the yellow crayon story again, but I think I understand kids pretty well. I think I could make them happy.” _Happier than my parents made me_. The words hung heavily in the air, unspoken.  
  
There are times when he mentions how differently his life would have gone if he and Willow hadn’t met me. The way he says it makes me think he believes it might not have gone so badly. I don’t remind him of how I got him out of the basement with its sweating walls or the radiator that squealed every time his mother walked down the stairs. I don’t remind him of how I gave him a purpose. I don’t remind him of how I _changed_ things. All he remembers is Glory. All he remembers are words written on a gravestone and summers when I had no choice but to vanish.   
  
Our neighbor’s child has a pet rabbit. Once I caught him staring at it. He whispered, “I never knew why she was so scared of them. Stupid fear.” But he was smiling, so tenderly. It made me want to throw up.   
  
I know he likes olive oil on his sandwiches. He knows that I secretly hate expensive moisturizer. When you date your best friend, there are no secrets. When I look in the mirror, I see someone stripped, laid bare, raw and exposed.   
  
Bits of bone poking through obscenely, as if they are trying to escape.   
  
+  
  
He built us a house in Santa Monica, just near enough to the pier to see the glint of waves echoing sunlight. He loves the view, and could drown it in for hours. I’m not sure why, but have never asked. Sometimes, he sketches it. I watch his palm rubbing the streaks of pencil and am reminded sharply of Angelus. It is as if spiders are creeping along my spine and it makes my insides shudder.   
  
In the morning, his lips taste of pennies when he gives me the paper and my coffee.   
  
“No Danish?” I pout and he chuckles, producing it from behind his back.  
  
“Strawberry, your favourite.”  
  
“Yay,” I clap my hands a little and take a bite.   
  
I got my appetite back a few months after Sunnydale was swallowed. My husband thinks I’m pregnant, but I just think I’m making up for lost time. I forgot chocolate and peanut butter. I forgot ice cream. I forgot _Doritos_ , for the love of God. My belly jiggles a bit when I touch it and my breasts have popped up again, as if to say, ‘here we are? Miss us?’ I did and sometimes before I get dressed for work, I lovingly rub them with lotion.  
  
“They’re like pets,” I tell him when we’re in bed. “They need proper care and attention.”  
  
He’s amused. “I can give them that.”  
  
“Not _that_ kind of attention,” I smile and trickle my fingers like water over his tattoo.   
  
“Think if we had a baby,” he whispers. “They’d get even bigger.”  
  
“A D cup is _not_ a reason to have a child,” I inform him tartly. “Social services would take it away.”  
  
“I’ll look after her.”  
  
“Her?”  
  
He looks down. “I’ve always wanted a daughter.”  
  
The old word takes my breath as if I am a fish on a hook. “I know. I’m sorry.”  
  
If I do not give him his normal, McDonalds, babies, white-picket-fence Tomorrow, then I will be the bad guy and I don’t want that. “Why don’t I throw away the birth control tomorrow?” I say.  
  
His smile makes my belly feel hot, as if I have swallowed fire. “You’re sure?”  
  
“Of course.” I kiss him lightly. His tongue is awash with red. He still drinks blood, though now his heart beats. “What should we name her?”  
  
His reply is a murmur, a ghost, and I pretend that I didn’t hear.   
  
“Cordelia.”  
  
+  
  
“I think we’re SOMEWHERE!”  
  
My eyelids protest as they lift slowly. Dawn’s screeches pierce through to my eardrums.   
  
“Dawnie,” I say firmly and pull her down. She is bouncing on the seat. “Shut up right now.”  
  
“Sheesh. You’re grouchy. Have a bad dream?”  
  
I look at her. At the pie-plate eyes and shining mass of hair and skinny, awkward little body and the green that crackles around her. I have been able to see it since Heaven. She smells of rubber bands and cherry cola.   
  
“Come here.” My arm encircles her and she snuggles against my breast. “You need to sleep, Dawnie. You’re going to be exhausted. We have a lot of traveling to do.”  
  
“Where are we going?” she mumbles.  
  
“I don’t know.” But I have decided. Rome. It's suitably far away, and we can disappear. But the biggest attraction is that it didn't feature in any of my dreams. _Dreams_. I want to believe that's all they were.   
  
“Sing to me. Mom always sang when she wanted me to shut up. If you want me to, you have to sing.”  
  
I smile faintly. Joyce’s grave is gone. We have no where left to mourn our Mother. “What do you want me to sing?”  
  
“Anything,” she yawns.  
  
I think for a moment and stroke her hair. “For you, there’ll be no crying. For you, the sun will be shining. Cause I feel that when I’m with you, it’s all right. I know, it’s right…”  
  
Outside, the sun drips over the horizon. I remember Glory’s castles in the sky and I remember Angelus and I remember sweating in the crypt and I _remember_ , oh how I remember that day of sweet, silly, perfect humanity – but there is only one road. Only one love of my life.   
  
“How much longer?” she whispers, her fingers slipping into the cradle of my palm. “How much longer, Buffy?”  
  
“Miles to go, little Miss Muffet,” I say, remembering. “Miles to go.”

 

~Finis


End file.
